Originally Posted by Doktor Goku

I've been messing around with Demoman for a while now, and what I've noticed is that while everybody preaches sticky grenades, the bouncy ones work far better for me- you just have to learn to arc them right in the blink of an eye to hit your enemies directly. It's not uncommon to take out a group of 3 or 4 people in 2fort in this manner.

I play demoman a lot, more than any other class, and I do pretty well. I never use sticky bombs in direct combat unless my grenade launcher is already empty. Usually I'll switch to the bottle before sticky bombs if I'm close to my opponent(s) too. For me, the delay between firing sticky bombs and being able to set them off is simply too long to be useful against anything that is moving. I only really use stickies in three situations:

1. Area denial (duh!)
2. Killing things that are being healed/repaired too fast for me to easily kill with regular grenades (sentries, heavies/soldiers with medics)
3. Long range artillery support. You can fire stickies farther than regular grenades. So, you can hit enemies in a small area from really far away, like, say, snipers on 2fort. (This is a really good deterrent to the snipers because they rarely see the stickies coming if they're zoomed in, and you can hit them while standing safely behind the wall on the battlement.)

Other than those situations, I always use the grenade launcher first. You just have to learn to lead shots and arc them right. (My countless hours of slaughtering bots with the Flak Cannon in UT2004 still serve me well )